In the distance, the sound of approaching horses and carriages could be heard. The others were coming, having followed as quickly as they could.
Jolthar looked down at Tamnarasi one last ti.
"When you report this to the Emperor, tell him the truth. Tell him I didn’t want this fight. Tell him I only defended myself. And tell him that if he sends people after again, I’ll keep defending myself, no matter who they are."
He turned and started walking back toward the city, leaving the defeated Princess-Commander kneeling in the ruins of their battlefield.
Behind him, Tamnarasi finally allowed herself to collapse fully, her body giving out now that the adrenaline was fading. She stared at the sky, processing the reality that she, commander of the Dreadmarchen, princess of the empire, one of the strongest warriors alive, had been defeated by a young man from a backwater territory.
The fact that a young man younger than her by several years, just a boy from country side had defeated her. Those words kept repeating in her head until she snapped.
She was like a madwoman, hung on the single fact of her defeat.
She slowly got up, and she bit her hand and drew a sigil in the air with her blood. The sigil glowed with bizarre light as her aura started to change.
Her knights and Wymar, who were watching her, recognized what she was doing, and their eyes went wide.
"NO! Princess, don’t do that."
It was a technique she learned from her ancestors and only suitable for her physique.
Jolthar had taken perhaps ten steps away when he felt it, a surge of power behind him, different from before.
Colder, sharper, more primal.
He turned, his hand instinctively going back to Knashii’s hilt.
Tamnarasi was standing again, but she wasn’t the sa. Her broken armor was falling away in pieces, revealing sothing underneath that made the air itself recoil. Her aura had changed completely, no longer the disciplined, controlled power of a trained warrior, but sothing ancient and raw.
Ice began forming around her body, but not like before.
This ice was alive, crystallizing in patterns that resembled feathers. Her wounds were sealing shut as the ice covered them, forming a new armor that looked less like protection and more like a second skin. The ice spread across her shoulders and down her back, creating what looked like massive wings made of thousands of interlocking ice crystals.
Her sword was changing too.
The elegant blade was extending, widening, transforming into a broad sword nearly as tall as she was. The tal itself was being consud by ice, becoming a weapon that was half steel, half frozen essence.
And her face, her expression had gone from exhausted defeat to sothing fierce and transcendent. Her eyes glowed with pale blue light, and when she exhaled, her breath ca out as a stream of freezing mist that crystallized the air around it.
"Heavenly Ice Phoenix Corpius," she said, her voice layered with harmonics that made it sound like multiple people speaking at once.
"I’ve never had to use it before. You should feel honored."
The transformation is completed.
Tamnarasi now stood dressed in what looked like an elegant gown made entirely of ice feathers, shimring with inner light. The wings on her back spread wide, each feather sharp enough to cut steel. Her entire form radiated cold so intense that frost was spreading outward from her feet in all directions.
She looked like a phoenix born of winter itself—beautiful, deadly, and absolutely terrifying.
"I do not accept defeat," she declared.
"Not to you. Not to anyone."
Jolthar’s eyes narrowed.
This was different.
The princess had just elevated herself to another level entirely. Whatever this technique was, it had pushed her beyond normal Tier 9 capabilities into sothing approaching the legendary.
"If you keep fighting," Jolthar said quietly, "one of us is going to die."
"Then die," Tamnarasi replied, and moved.
Her speed had doubled, no, tripled.
One mont, she was thirty feet away; the nex,t her massive blade was descending toward Jolthar’s head with force that split the air itself. The ice wings on her back weren’t just decorative; they propelled her movents, cutting friction to nothing and allowing her to maneuver in ways that defied normal physics.
Jolthar barely got Knashii up in ti to block.
The impact drove him backward, his feet carving trenches in the ground as he slid twenty feet before stopping. His arms went numb from the sheer force of the blow.
She didn’t give him ti to recover.
She was on him again, her broadsword coming from a different angle, then another, then another. Each strike was perfectly placed, impossibly fast, and carried enough power to cleave through stone like paper.
Jolthar defended, but he was being pushed back. His previous advantage in speed had been neutralized—now they were roughly equal, and her technique with the blade was still superior to his. His telekinesis tried to interfere with her movents, but the ice wings compensated automatically, adjusting her trajectory mid-strike.
The ground around them was being devastated.
Every exchange of blows created craters and sent shockwaves rolling across the plains. The earth itself was being carved apart, massive trenches appearing where their attacks missed and struck the ground instead.
Tamnarasi spun, using her wings to generate a spiral of freezing wind.
"Glacier Phoenix—Thousand Feather Storm!"
The ice wings shattered into thousands of individual crystalline feathers, each one razor-sharp and moving independently. They filled the air like a swarm, converging on Jolthar from every direction simultaneously.
And behind that storm, Tamnarasi herself ca, her broad sword raised for a killing blow.
Jolthar’s eyes went completely black—not dark, but truly black, like windows into the void itself.
"Void Severance-Bound Nothing."
His sword moved in a perfect circle around his body, and where it passed, reality split.
A sphere of absolute void ford around him, a space where nothing could exist. The ice feathers hit that boundary and simply ceased to be, not shattered or lted but erased from existence.
Tamnarasi’s charge brought her blade crashing into the void boundary, and for the first ti, she felt genuine fear. Her sword was beginning to dissolve where it touched that sphere, the tal and ice being consud by nothingness.
She pulled back just in ti, her transford physique’s instincts screaming danger.
They separated again, both breathing hard now.
The battlefield between them was a wasteland, the ground was torn apart in massive gouges, so areas frozen solid, others showing patches of absolute emptiness where void energy had touched.
Jolthar was adjusting to her new speed. His body was adapting, his reflexes recalibrating. He began to move differently, not trying to match her speed directly but instead positioning himself where her attacks would be, eting them before they fully developed.
"You’re adapting," Tamnarasi noted, her voice tight with frustration.
"How are you adapting so quickly?"
"Because I have to," Jolthar replied simply.
"That’s how you survive impossible situations: you adapt, or you die."
They clashed again, and this ti Jolthar was no longer being pushed back. He had found the rhythm of her transford state, the patterns in her technique. His blade work beca more precise and more economical, wasting no movent.
Tamnarasi felt it—the battle was turning again.
This shouldn’t be possible.
She was using her ultimate technique, her bloodline inheritance, power that had been refined over generations of her family line. And yet this young man was matching her, learning from her, and growing stronger even as they fought.
She poured more power into her attacks, her ice wings regenerating and multiplying. Now she had four wings, then six, each pair giving her more speed and maneuverability. She struck from angles that should have been impossible, using the wings to change direction mid-attack.
But Jolthar’s void energy responded in kind. Dark tendrils began extending from Knashii, creating additional attacking vectors. His telekinesis worked in concert with these tendrils, creating a three-dinsional offense that matched her aerial superiority.
The ground beneath them gave way completely, unable to withstand the forces being unleashed. They were fighting in a crater now, twenty feet deep and growing with every exchange.
User Comments
0 comments from readers